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Books will soon be obsolete in school

• PaulHoule 1y ago
  Every public school teacher I know comes home crying from time to time because of the emotional load. The husband of my wife’s best friend is a music teacher who’s been assaulted by students multiple times. The science teacher who inspired me to study physics showed me the classroom, years later, where he teaches, and there were so many chairs packed in I asked “has the fire marshall been here?” That is, a huge part of the job is dealing with unruly behavior and bullshit and not even instruction. If AI is going to make a positive difference in education it’s going to have to take a bite out of that!
  • Bender 1y ago
    I've heard similar anecdotes. I am of the opinion that AI can't fix that. That will require school boards and parents willing to change budget allocation to school police and local governments that implement zero tolerance on [instigating] violence. Parents of violent kids will of course get upset and emit crocodile tears because their "little darling" would "never hurt anyone". Cameras in classrooms, body cams on teachers, school police and lock up the little darlings will take a bite out of it. Short of that and we just lose more good teachers. Kids can earn back camera free classrooms once the violent ones are weeded out. I would put the AI in juvenile hall to teach the violent kids. It will be a dystopian environment but they earned it and can earn their way out of it. [Edit] - I learned today that school districts have been lazy and using "zero tolerance" to even include defending ones self vs instigation of violence. This is indefensible. I will be encouraging POTUS to end all pax payer funded education and federal funding to states if schools and states can not get their act together and change verbiage to be zero tolerance for instigators of violence.
    • xyzzy123 1y ago
      > It will be a dystopian environment but they earned it and can earn their way out of it. It's not very clear cut but sometimes it seems like kids just end up being punished for having bad parents.
      • diggan 1y ago
        > it seems like kids just end up being punished for having bad parents Yeah, hard to make the right call, depends on the age and maturity of the kid I guess. I myself is a product of "bad parents", and it was reflected in my own behavior up until I was 15-16 years old, when I started realizing what I was doing really had an impact on my fellow humans, so at one point I started consciously working on myself to not be like that anymore. So a 6 year old will most definitely just be a product of how the parents act, but once you get older you need to also take responsibility for how you yourself are as a person. What exact age that is seems to differ by country.
      • Marazan 1y ago
        This is the crux of the matter and any "solution" offered that ignores that young children are primarily the product of their parenting is no solution at all
        • Bender 1y ago
          Well, this gets dark really fast but the scientific solution is to sterilize the kids and their parents to end a bad blood line. Obviously that will never be legal to do. It won't solve doctors prescribing off-label anti-psychotic drugs, people eating garbage and excessive drinking of fermented crap which leads to compulsive behavior.
          • diggan 1y ago
            > but the scientific solution is to sterilize the kids and their parents to end a bad blood line Not even a good solution, the amount of good people we'd be missing out on would be huge. Plenty of great people come from shit parents/backgrounds.
            • Bender 1y ago
              How do we break the cycle?
              • 1y ago
    • SnuffBox 1y ago
      > I would put the AI in juvenile hall to teach the violent kids. It will be a dystopian environment but they earned it and can earn their way out of it. I feel that this would only further embitter the violent children and would cause more problems than it would theoretically solve.
    • bombcar 1y ago
      You can’t require mandatory attendance AND have zero-X policies. It’s impossible. Something has to give.
      • Bender 1y ago
        The attendance of the violent kids will have to give.
      • dsego 1y ago
        Not everybody even deserves school. Unfortunately, society benefits from everyone having at least some education, so making school non compulsory could have more detrimental effects with overall poorer education in the populace. With that said, I'm all for removing disruptive kids from classrooms, but they would need a more controlled environment, which is hardly feasible.
        • bombcar 1y ago
          We used to have them, but most have been removed or are no longer considered acceptable options - various boarding schools for “troubled” children or military school.
      • logicchains 1y ago
        I'd wager if anyone actually studied the effect of mandatory attendance on that bottom percentile of persistently violent, disruptive students, they'd find almost no improvement in their outcomes. Yet their presence has a demonstrable negative effect on other students and teachers alike. The right approach would be to base attendance policies on science, not wishful ideology.
        • bombcar 1y ago
          As usual when the realities are ignored for fairy-tale dream stories. The rich and powerful don’t care to try to fix it because they have their kids in private schools anyway, and the upper middle class can move to areas the worst poor can’t afford. So only the working poor have to suffer. But at least they’re told it is a righteous suffering.
    • TimorousBestie 1y ago
      > Cameras in classrooms, body cams on teachers, school police and lock up the little darlings will take a bite out of it. This has been the status quo in many schools for a while now. Whether or not it helped is unclear and a subject of ongoing debate. If you want things to change, you need a novel intervention. As for zero tolerance policies, they are exhausting to implement and feel deeply unjust to everyone involved. Having to suspend or expel a student for defending themselves never feels good. But if one doesn’t, the policy is no longer zero tolerance.
      • Bender 1y ago
        Having to suspend or expel a student for defending themselves never feels good. If they are expelled for defending themselves the policies need to change. The cameras should provide evidence they were defending themselves. When enough violent kids are removed the incidence of having to defend one's self should be reduced with time.
        • TimorousBestie 1y ago
          If you don’t like this outcome, you should not support zero tolerance policies. Zero tolerance denotes a policy where the root causes do not affect the consequences. There’s no zero tolerance policy where “providing evidence” is an effective defense.
          • Bender 1y ago
            This is a retcon of the original meaning of zero tolerance. Zero tolerance means the instigators are removed from the picture without question. If it is documented or implemented otherwise then we will have to fix it and schools will have to stop being lazy.
        • RHSeeger 1y ago
          That's the point though; zero-tolerance means that the cause doesn't matter. Defending yourself means you participated in violence and you're punished for it. Zero-tolerance is a horrible idea in general, and only sense in the context of protecting the institution from liability.
    • astura 1y ago
      >I would put the AI in juvenile hall to teach the violent kids. It will be a dystopian environment but they earned it and can earn their way out of it. Children didn't "earn" being born to shit heads. Fuck off.
      • Bender 1y ago
        Children didn't "earn" being born to shit heads. Fuck off. No thanks. If it can be proven the parents are negligent or responsible there are processes in place for this too. Whether or not a state or provincial government has the wherewithal to invoke the process is another question.
      • BeFlatXIII 1y ago
        They must've done bad shit in a prior life.
    • trinix912 1y ago
      You don’t need any creepy surveillance tech, just teachers with the proper rights to punish those who violate the rules. As long as teachers can’t say or do anything without parents rushing to the school and threatening with lawsuits, nothing will change, no matter how much surveillance tech we throw at the problem.
      • CafeRacer 1y ago
        Yep, a proper whack, in my opinion, will solve many problems. Also it should legally be allowed to whack a parent, as long as it is justified.
        • Bender 1y ago
          That is what school police or local police and sheriff are for. They are taught when whacking or more is appropriate and their job requires they accept the risk. Teachers should not be required to accept this risk even if they are physically capable.
          • thfuran 1y ago
            Cops in the U.S. don’t accept risk; they shoot whatever makes them nervous.
            • CafeRacer 1y ago
              Yeah, I remember these videos when there is a school shooter and cops are just chilling outside. I'd be not against the idea of teacher-whaking feature. Also, if there is a kid who bullies my kid, I'd not be against the idea to whack a parent of that kid, if nothing else works. Obviously everything should be at the reasonable level. I am heavily against the idea that certain powers should be centralized into a single entity.
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    • thfuran 1y ago
      >zero tolerance on violence Why do you think kids should be punished for getting bullied?
      • Bender 1y ago
        Edited to say instigating violence.
  • hnlmorg 1y ago
    Absolutely. The untold truth about teaching is that it’s equal parts social worker as educator. Not just with bad behaviour, but with diagnosing child with needs, identifying domestic abuse, and so on. It’s heart breaking some of the shit they need to do and which any normal person wouldn’t even consider as part of the job. My wife has had to handle more than one incident with serious child sexual abuse. This isn’t something teachers expect to do when they apply for their jobs.
    • paulryanrogers 1y ago
      > My wife has had to handle more than one incident with serious child sexual abuse. This isn’t something teachers expect to do when they apply for their jobs. My spouse also taught and heard some difficult stories of home troubles. But she did have school counselors she could recommend. I'm not sure there is a better alternative. Someone has to be on the front lines with kids. Perhaps all kids should have to talk to a (school?) counselor or social worker periodically? It would certainly be money better spent than burning money on crypto mining, AI, or cutting taxes of the top 10%.
    • Whoppertime 1y ago
      And that's yet another unintended consequence of the COVID lockdowns. Teachers as social workers had trouble diagnosing domestic abuse or other problems encountered by their remote students. One of those things we will be dealing with for a long time to come
  • coolKid721 1y ago
    [flagged]
  • smitty1e 1y ago
    Maybe the word "public" deserves more attention. Taxing people to fund education seems to be reducing the product to glorified day care. Those with means (and I would be one) send their kids to private schools for a variety of reasons. This deserves more analysis.
    • RHSeeger 1y ago
      > Those with means (and I would be one) send their kids to private schools for a variety of reasons. I don't think this is true at all. There are plenty of areas where the public schools do a fantastic job, and plenty of people "with means" sending their children there.
      • logicchains 1y ago
        Those are mostly areas where the cost of living prevents the most dysfunctional families/kids from living there.
        • trinix912 1y ago
          Rich people have shithead kids too, I’ve seen this in a country where the rich send their kids to public schools.
    • notpachet 1y ago
      > Those with means (and I would be one) send their kids to private schools for a variety of reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma
      • ndriscoll 1y ago
        Private schools can reject problem kids, so the "both defect" case doesn't really apply as long as the school is selective (which for schools catering to rich people is the entire point).
    • threetonesun 1y ago
  • ivape 1y ago
    Talked to a family member of mine recently who is an teacher and he basically suggested the kids in his high school were illiterate. They can’t read.
• zkmon 1y ago
  That prediction is assuming everything else to remain static. Why are the children learning in school? What should they be learning? What exactly is the goal of schooling? What future work are they training for? A lot of projections for future trends are made using isolated contexts, as if the world around them is not moving or changing.
• simpaticoder 1y ago
  There are at least two lessons to learn from this article. First, humans have a penchant for over-extrapolating from scientific discovery. My favorite example is soon after Röntgen discovered X-rays science fiction and comic books extrapolated a huge variety of "rays". We have such a strong yearning for great change, even as we fear it. Second, there exists a basic "least common denominator" existence that has held since farming was invented: we are born, we live and work, we die, and between that time we live in a house, go to school, fall in love, eat, sleep, and (more recently) read. These features of human life don't change much since they are tied to our biology, which is in turn tied to the time and place of our emergence. Books are wonderful inventions - they are low cost, require no power to operate, have a very high information density, can be shared and reused over many generations of humans. They fit us so well, we will probably never "transcend" them, just like we'll probably always have diapers and pillows, no matter how far we go. And honestly, what's wrong with that?
  • thfuran 1y ago
    Universal public schooling in its modern form is very recent and certainly not some sort of biological imperative. Before cheap books and universal literacy (which is frankly something of an overstatement), it wasn't remotely plausible to expect reading books to be a near ubiquitous pastime, and even now recreational reading has decreased in the past few decades. You may quite like to read, but framing it a some kind of eternal and universal experience is just complete nonsense.
• 1270018080 1y ago
  A top shovel seller claiming shovels are going to replace books in school
• raldi 1y ago
  I’ve learned a lot more from talking directly to people, watching videos, participating in forums, and doing things than I ever have from books. This is especially true now. I’m not sure the 1913 take was wrong. For the past year or so, whenever I’ve wanted to learn something from a book, I’ve downloaded the Kindle edition, converted to plain text, given it to Claude, and asked it to tutor me chapter by chapter.
• jillesvangurp 1y ago
  As somebody that used to drag about 10kg worth of books back and forth to high school in the eighties, I don't think getting rid of that is necessarily that bad. And there are only so many books you can drag with you. And most of the educational books were pretty crappy and uninspiring as I recall. Modern kids can have access to a wealth of information. AIs doing what teachers don't have time to do might actually be an improvement. I had some great teachers that went above and beyond, and also quite a few burned out not so great ones too. Modern schools weren't created to enlighten people but to turn kids into productive factory workers meeting bare minimum standards. Historically, there always was a big difference between the rich and the poor on this front. And whisking away the few smart kids and training those up properly was something left for higher education. Modern tech creates potential for more bespoke and tailored teaching but also lots of challenges for teachers.
• akkad33 1y ago
  Reads like an AI written linkedin post
• softwaredoug 1y ago
  I cannot focus on much when “learning” on a digital device. There’s always some social media to distract me. I suspect paper books may be one of the few tools available to educators to get students to actually unplug and focus.
• dkiebd 1y ago
  [flagged]
• thefaux 1y ago
  There is a naive belief that media does not matter so long as the same content is presented. For various reasons, I believe books are far better learning tools than digital devices for most things. Among other things, memory is linked to place and space. A physical book is a link to the real world that grounds the learning in space and differentiates it from other materials. My theory, based on my personal experience, is that reading a physical book, you have an experience with that object that helps link the content into the spacial memory system. Physical books can be totemic symbols of learning. Just having them around is a reminder of what you've learned, or what you've been putting off if they remain unread. Physical books are also wonderful gifts that digital can never replicate. A wise old man once gave me a book that he cherished and had been given to him in commemoration of his contribution to its production (it was a very important book). Every one of the hundreds of pages was filled with many of his annotations. Whenever I read from it, I am connected to him and his study. What would be the equivalent for digital? Giving someone a used phone?
  • AndrewOMartin 1y ago
    This reminds me of a quote from Bob Monkhouse who wrote a lot for radio. Paraphrasing, "I admit TV can do some things radio can't do. But it can't do some of the things radio can do."
• solatic 1y ago
  There is a qualitative difference to the argument: lectures (from before millennia), books (in the last few hundred years), and movies (in the last few decades), were all non-interactive. A student would sit and consume passively. There is a limit to how well you can learn with passive instruction alone. The promise of AI is to bring the Oxford model - 1:1 studying with a tutor, with whom the student engages and to whom the tutor gives their full attention - down to a price point at which it would become feasible to educate the masses with it. Are LLMs actually capable of re-producing a good-enough simulation of the Oxford model? Will this simulation of the Oxford model produce better educational outcomes at scale - something that has been theorized but was of course far too expensive to prove - when deployed to the masses through public education? Maybe? Who knows? Time will tell. For what it's worth - I don't think books will become obsolete, either in schools or anywhere else. Paper books might become obsolete, but there is no option on the table that proposes to completely replace the art of science of having life experience and committing it to longform. As long as copyright protects its commercialibility, it will continue.
• mathiaspoint 1y ago
  If it were PDFs or static HTML files you could save and handle like a book this would be great. Anyone who's had the misfortune of graduating college in the past ten years and experiencing the detritus from Pearson students are forced to pay hundreds of dollars for knows this is actually a massive regression.